The Nova Scotia Government & General Employees Union says Capital Health has humiliated dozens of nurses by asking them to write a letter admitting they allegedly risked patient safety in staging a wildcat strike April 1.

The district health authority ordered some nurses to write a confessional saying they violated the College of Registered Nurses’ code of ethics in the labour action, union president Joan Jessome said.

It’s an unprecedented move, Jessome said, and one she has never seen in any other labour negotiations.

“We feel it’s a form of humiliation and not a form of discipline,” the union president said Monday. “The members are quite emotional. There’s shock, anger, disbelief.”

The union filed a grievance with the health authority Monday afternoon, Bruce English, Capital Health’s director of people services, said in an interview.

Capital Health has been having disciplinary meetings with some of the more than 200 nurses who walked off the job to protest provincial legislation that they said would take away their collective bargaining rights. The emergency services bill, which passed in April, limited the power of health-care unions to go on strike, making it illegal to do so until both sides agreed upon staffing levels during bargaining.

The union said last week that Capital Health handed several nurses two-day suspensions for participating in the walkout, something the authority would not confirm at the time.

Authority spokesman Everton McLean said then that nurses were being interviewed and some could face discipline up to a suspension.

Jessome could not say Monday how many nurses have been suspended or how many have been asked to write letters. Disciplinary meetings are slated to continue all week, she said.

English said about 40 nurses whose absence would have had a more significant effect on patients have been asked to write letters.

He said those might be nurses who did not show up for work and did not call in sick, which might have left a unit short-staffed. He said nurses on certain units with higher patient demands might also be asked to write the letter. He would not say what areas were affected, citing privacy issues.

“The whole purpose (of the letter) was that there was some sense it was a professional practice issue and it would be good for people to reflect on it,” English said.

In disciplinary meetings, Jessome said, some nurses have been asked to “reflect on the college’s … code of ethics (and) provide to the employer a written submission” describing how their actions on April 1 impacted patient care and what they would do differently in the future.

The union president said there’s concern the documents could be used against the nurses.

“Who’s to say the employer doesn’t send the whole batch of them off to the college,” which could affect a nurse’s licence to practise, she said.

English said that will not happen.

“They will not go to the college,” he said. “We’ve made a decision not to go through this as a disciplinary process with the college.”

Jessome said the union has received calls from the public and from nurses’ colleagues offering money to compensate them for wages lost due to suspension.

Shawna Boudreau received a two-day suspension for participating in the wildcat strike, but said she will not have to write a letter. The 24-year nurse said that before the suspension notice, she had only ever had positive feedback added to her personnel file.

The health authority’s decision to punish nurses will only further erode morale, she said, particularly for those given the task of personal reflection.

“It’s petty,” she said. “It’s insulting, because we are adult professionals that follow that standard of ethics and code of conduct and for many people they’ve followed (it) for more than two decades.”

Although Capital Health receives most of its funding from the province, a spokesman for the Health Department said the government stayed out of the disciplinary decisions.